This invention relates in general to educational card games. In particular, it relates to games played with cards as the sole material element, in which both chance and the skills of the players are factors which determine the outcome of the game.
This invention presents two games with the advantages of being both recreational and educational, the first of which can be played with one to as many decks as a given embodiment consists of (depending on the number of players), and the second of which has the advantage of facilitating the quick separation of all of the decks used for the first game.
It can be used as an enjoyable game, or it can be used as a teaching aid, or both. In one embodiment, the first game can be used to advantage to teaching a person the basic relations of propositional algebra. In a second embodiment, the first game can be used to teach the basic relations of arithmetic equality, inequality, and divisibility. In fact, there are an unlimited number of embodiments, each of which can be used to advantage to teach a person some manner of mathematical relations.
Other advantages of this system will be readily discernible upon a reading of the text hereinafter.
Each card bears on one face a pair of relations and/or a pair of values, and on the other face a fixed design of fixed color or colors. The decks are identical to each other on the value/relation face, but differ on the fixed design/color(s) face, which is uniform for each deck. A pair of relations for purposes of this specification and the following claims is defined as any mathematical (arithmetic, propositional, lingual, etc.) binary relation and its inverse, or a mathematical unary function (printed in two directions). A pair of values for purposes of this specification and the following claims is defined as any two values (or one value written in two directions) such that the card on which they are written may appear meaningfully on one side of a card on which a binary relation pair appears. Values and relations may be represented by any words or symbols, so long as their meanings remain consistent throughout the game in which they are used. This means that some embodiments of this invention could be constructed from decks of traditional playing cards.
Before the start of the first game, a number of cards are chosen to be placed, relation/value face up, forming a complete mathematical (arithmetic, propositional, lingual, etc.) statement (or an incomplete one to be validly completed by the first player). The cards are then shuffled, and a number of cards are dealt to each player relation/value face down. Each player looks through his cards privately and attempts to get rid of them in a manner similar to that used in the traditional card game "Eights" (also known as "Crazy Eights" or "Swedish Rummy"), by placing one or more cards per turn (in accordance with the rules of the applied embodiment) such that a valid statement results, picking extra cards when necessary. The first player to get rid of all his cards in this manner is the winner of the first game.
At the beginning of the second game, all of the decks are shuffled together and a number of cards are dealt out fixed face up and sorted according to design/color. The rest of the cards are dealt out fixed face down, so that all have the same number of cards, and any remaining cards are added to the fixed face up cards. The players then look through their cards privately and bid numbers of cards for cards of another design/color in the fixed face up set, trying to gain the largest number of cards of one or more decks.